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Various forms of participation in the comfort women issue by young people: left

The funeral home at Severance Hospital in Seoul’s Seodaemun district was the site of a wake on Apr. 5 for the late former comfort woman Lee Soon-deok. The event was quiet early on, but soon a long line of students arrived to express condolences. After his visit on Apr. 5, Kim Jeong-hwan, the “one-man media” known as Media Mongu, had tweeted the message, “The wake’s at Severance Hospital, but there’s not much of a turnout.” In response, everyone from uniformed high school students to university students from Seodaemun’s Sinchon area showed up to share condolences.

“Thirty to forty Ewha Womans University students have come by for condolences, and they’ve just been sobbing. I wish to sincerely thank the 1,400 mourners who have been us as we’ve said goodbye,” wrote Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan (Jeongdaehyeop) president Yoon Mi-hyang in an Apr. 5 Facebook message.

Yu Ji-ye, a 20-year-old Korean language and literature student at Ewha, arrived on Apr. 5 with friends. Yu’s first real interest in the comfort women issue started after she learned of the South Korean and Japanese government’s comfort woman agreement of Dec. 28, 2015, when she was a second-year high school student. After entering university, she’d joined Peace Butterfly Supporters, a group of people working to resolve the comfort women issue.

“I think the younger generation needs to show more of an interest in the comfort women issue and take part in a activities toward a resolution,” she said.

Young people in their teens and twenties have been swarming to sites associated with the comfort women survivors. Uniformed middle school students have been the main participants at the weekly Wednesday demonstrations for a resolution to the comfort women issue. Teenagers and twentysomethings have also been central to nationwide campaigns to guard comfort women statues.

What accounts for young people’s strong interest in the comfort women issue? Analysts are attributing it to a combination of learning in school about the comfort women’s painful history and their generation’s shared experience with societal controversies, including the furor over the Dec. 28 agreement. Young South Koreans in their teens and twenties are the first generation to have really learned about the comfort women in school. While it was first recorded in middle and high school history textbooks in 1996, the reference amounted to a single sentence; it wasn’t until 2002 that the first real accounts surfaced in textbooks.

The setting up of comfort woman statues has also triggered public attention as true icons of the comfort women’s suffering. Indeed, news that Japan had demanded relocation of the statues at the time of the Dec. 28 agreement led to the first outdoor sit-in protest on Dec. 30 beside the statue outside the former Japanese embassy in Seoul. As the protests continue on past their 460th day, it’s common to find university students in their twenties taking part, along with middle school students appearing to offer them encouragement.

Choi Hye-ryeon, 22, is a representative of Joint University Student Action for an Apology and Compensation to the Japanese Military Comfort Women and Abandonment of the Sellout South Korea-Japan Agreement, which has been leading the sit-in.

“The younger visitors are, the more they cry to see the survivors and the statue at the Wednesday demonstrations,” she said, suggesting younger people sympathize more acutely with the suffering as they see a statue of a girl their own age. It’s a situation that suggests the emergence of a “comfort woman statue generation” that sees the comfort women’s suffering as their own issue.

Young people are also starting to take action to set up their own statues. Last year, students at Seoul’s Ewha Girls’ High School raised money to place a small comfort women statue on their own campus. They called on other students across South Korea to do the same; statues have been set up at 28 high schools to date.

“The students are rational in their judgments on issues like Dokdo and history textbooks,” said Ewha Girls’ High School history teacher Seong Hwan-cheol. “But the comfort women issue is something they seem to sympathize with emotionally.”

By Hwang Keum-bi and Park Soo-jin, staff reporters

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